Speaker 1: You know, governments lock their darkest files away for decades.
Sometimes we all learn a version of history in school, right,
a neat timeline, wars, elections, big policy shifts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of a managed version exactly.
Speaker 1: But that public record it's often just well, a carefully
managed facade. Like you said, So, what happens when the
files marked never to see the light of day, the
what's detailing like biological testing or psychic spies, or even
plans for false flag attacks. What happens when they finally surface.
Speaker 2: Well, it's like an earthquake under the public narrative. It
really creates this fracture. Yeah, and what's fascinating I think
is how discovering these secrets forces you, the listener citizen,
to sort of redefine your relationship with the government itself.
Oh so, because these accounts, when they come out, they
show the immense operational breadth of these classified projects. I
mean everything from huge engineering schemes, high tech military plans,
right to sometimes things that are just ethically bankrupt or
frankly completely absurd.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's unpack this. Then we've pulled together a
stack of documents, reports, first hand accounts detailing operations that
were meticulously hidden, like really hidden, some for forty years,
some even longer. And I covered this huge range secret
biological experiments right in major US cities, billion dollar failures,
trying to raise a Soviet sub.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Azorian, we'll get to that.
Speaker 1: And even the military seriously trying to turn like spoon
bendors into actual intelligence assets.
Speaker 2: It sounds unbelievable, but it happened. Our sources for this
dive they span really different eras You've got World War
two espionage and propaganda right up through the absolute peak
of Cold War paranoia, and they reveal these consistent, sometimes
quite unsettling patterns in how big organizations operate when they're
outside the view of democratic.
Speaker 1: Oversight, Which leads to the big question, I guess.
Speaker 2: Exactly when does all that secrecy really used for legitimate
national protection? And when is it actually a shield, a
shield to hide maybe gross negligence or catastrophic failure, or
even just plain moral manipulation. That tension. That's really the
central mission for our deep dive today finding that line.
Speaker 1: Okay, so where do we start. Let's begin with an
operation that well, it fundamentally put military simulation way ahead
of public health. Yeah, and it had immediate, devastating and
incredibly long lasting consequences right here on American soil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one is shilling. You're talking about Operation Sea Spray.
Speaker 1: That's the one. Tell us about it.
Speaker 2: Okay, So this is basically a case study in state
sanctioned biological release onto an unsuspecting civilian population. The year
was in nineteen fifty, late September specifically, and the setting
the really densely populated San Francisco Bay Area. The core
event was the US Navy intentionally sailing ships into the
bay and using these giant sprayers to release two specific
living types of bacteria into the air over the city.
Speaker 1: Sure, spray bacteria over San Francisco. What were they thinking?
What was the justification?
Speaker 2: Well, the justification they kept secret until nineteen seventy seven
was simulation. They claimed they needed to simulate what would
happen if, say, an enemy deployed a bioweapon attack on
a major city. Okay, they wanted to track aerosol dispersion, basically,
map how far a weapon like that would travel across
a city of millions of people. So they needed something.
Speaker 1: To track, and they chose bacteria, which ones, two specific
ones Seratia Marceessens and Basillis globegi. Now the choice here
is actually pretty crucial and often gets overlooked. Wow, Besill's Globegi,
which we now know is Basilla's subtilis, was chosen mainly
because it was easy to detect. They had surveillance monitors
set up across the city.
Speaker 2: Okay, makes sense for tracking. What about the other one, Siatia.
Speaker 1: Ah Siatiu marceessens. That was chosen because at the time,
the prevailing scientific view was that it was a non pathogen.
They thought it wouldn't make anyone seriously ill, they thought
they thought plus and this was key for tracking. It
produces this really distinctive, kind of bizarre red pigment made
it incredibly easy to spot in samples. So the Navy
picked organisms they believed were low risk, easily traceable, perfect
data points.
Speaker 2: Except the results were not low risk, were they not
at all? Within weeks the effects became tragically apparent. We
know that eleven people suddenly showed up at Stanford Hospital,
all with severe urinary tract infection.
Speaker 1: Eleven people just like that, just like that, And.
Speaker 2: When the doctors tested their urine, they found that signature
bizarre red colored bacteria. They identified it as seratium or sessence.
Speaker 1: Wow, and was that common? Did they know where it
came from?
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. Outbreaks of this specific bacteria were so rare
back then. This cluster of cases was genuinely mysterious, medically shocking,
actually severe enough that the doctors published the findings in
a medical journal at the time. Their first suspicion that
it originated inside the hospital, you know, like a hospital
born in especially comment after surgery. They did extensive internal
investigations trying to find the source, but.
Speaker 1: The real source was outside, being sprayed from Navy ships,
hidden classified files exactly.
Speaker 2: And the human cost really comes into focus with the
tragic case of Edward Nevin. He was recovering from prostate
surgery at the time he contracted the SERRATIONI infection and
he didn't survive. It claimed his life.
Speaker 1: So he died because of the secret test.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the devastating implication, while the other ten patients
in that specific cluster eventually recovered. The strong possibility that
his death was a direct consequence of a secret government
experiment on his own city. It's just a gut punch,
especially for his family and for the public once it
came out.
Speaker 1: And that's just the eleven confirmed cases at Stanford. What
about wider effects.
Speaker 2: That's the other deeply tripling part. Our sources mentioned reports
that pneumonia cases spiked significantly in the Bay.
Speaker 1: Area that year really linked to the bacteria.
Speaker 2: It's impossible to prove definitively because nobody knew the test
was happening. There was no informed consent, so there was
no mechanism to track broader health issues. So the possibility
that sea spray caused a wider health crisis, while never proven,
has certainly never been ruled out either. It casts this
really dark shadow over that year's public health.
Speaker 1: Records, and the secrecy lasted for decades.
Speaker 2: Until nineteen seventy seven. That's when investigations finally brought the
truth to light. But here's the thing. The bacteria didn't
just disappear when the tests stopped.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: The sources are quite clear on this. The release actually
altered the local microbiome in the Bay Area. Ciatia is
pretty hardy. It lingered in the soil, the air, the
water around San Francisco.
Speaker 1: It a depth a stuck around for years decades.
Speaker 2: And that environmental contamination meant that subsequent, completely unrelated outbreaks
were possible long after the Navy sailed away.
Speaker 1: Wow, were there legal consequences? Did Devon's family do anything
they did?
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty one, Edward's family sued the government for negligence,
now proving causation years after the fact against a massive
entity like the government. It's incredibly difficult, I can imagine,
but the lawsuit itself underscored the need for accountability for answers.
Speaker 1: Did the contamination cost problems later on?
Speaker 2: It absolutely did. Look at the later outbreaks. In two
thousand and one, that's over fifty years later, there was
a meningitis outbreak in Walnut Creek, which is about forty
kilometers east of SSH. The source a local pharmacies supply
of spinal injections. They'd been contaminated with the exact same
Ceratia bacteria the way. Yeah, three people died in that outbreak,
ten were hospitalized. It links right back to an environmental
presence that simply shouldn't have been there.
Speaker 1: That's unbelievable any other instances.
Speaker 2: Even more recently, in two thousand and four, a biotech
firm based in Emeryville chiron Core had to throw out
an entire batch of flu vaccines. Why contamination trace back
to the facility's environment again likely ciatia.
Speaker 1: So a secret test in nineteen fifty leads to deaths, lawsuits,
lingering contamination, deadly outbreaks decades later, even impacting vaccine production.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible tragic chain of consequences when a government
prioritizes military simulation over citizen safety, releases biological agents, even
ones presumed benign, and then hides it. The difficulty improving
cause and effect later just highlights the impunity.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder, doesn't it. How many other
weird health clusters or environmental shifts in cities might trace
back to some long forgotten, undisclosed test activity.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the failure of oversight means the real cost of
that secrecy is paid by the unsuspecting public, potentially for generations. Yeah, okay,
So from physical contamination of the environment, let's shift gears. Now,
let's talk about psychological contamination, the systemic effort to manipulate
information to disrupt enemy structures from within.
Speaker 1: All right, where does that take us?
Speaker 2: This brings us squarely to Operation Mockingbird.
Speaker 1: Mockingbird. This is the one that really shook people's faith
in the media.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, absolutely, And the revelation didn't come from some
classified leak initially, but from incredible investigative journalism. Carl Bernstein, Yes,
the Watergate. Bernstein dropped this bombshell in a nineteen seventy
seven Rolling Stone article.
Speaker 1: And what did he reveal?
Speaker 2: He revealed that hundreds of American journalists were secretly acting
as CIA assets part of this program Operation Mockingbird.
Speaker 1: Hundreds were they spies? What were they doing?
Speaker 2: It's important to understand how this evolved. It actually started
way back during World War Two with the OSS, which
was the precursor to the CIA. Journalists, by their very nature,
travel widely, they ask probing questions. They were seen as
natural allies for gathering intelligence. By the time the Cold
War was really raging, these informal ties had solidified into
actual operational relationships.
Speaker 1: So the CIA was actively using.
Speaker 2: Reporters systematically using accredited American reporters as intelligence assets abroad.
These journalists would travel across Western Europe, later into South America,
gathering vital intel on foreign political movements, leaders, local sentiment,
all under the perfect cover of just doing their job
filing stories.
Speaker 1: Was there a trade off? What did the journalists get
out of it?
Speaker 2: It was a highly classified quid pro quo. The reporters
gathered information the agency wanted, and in return they got
exclusive stories scoops about CIA operations. Okay, but these were
stories the agency wanted out there, stories that serve perceived
American interests. Usually framed US pushing back against the threat
of communism. It was a way for the government to
try and manage the global information environment.
Speaker 1: How many journalists were involved, you said, hundreds? But were
they all like paid agents?
Speaker 2: The sources suggest that at the peak, maybe around one
hundred journalists were actually on the CIS payroll, but many
more were likely involved in less formal arrangements. This went on.
Speaker 1: For decades until when what stopped it?
Speaker 2: Intense pressure and public outcry in the mid nineteen seventies,
particularly after Watergate and other revelations about intelligence abuses, it
forced the issue. The agency publicly announced in nineteen seventy
six that they were cutting those ties. They promised no
more paid or contractual relationship with the credited US reporters.
Speaker 1: But the damage was done, wasn't it, especially to trust?
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely, And here's a crucial point. Bernstein's reporting specifically
focused on journalists working abroad gathering foreign intelligence.
Speaker 1: Right, non domestic propaganda.
Speaker 2: Correct, but the long term damage was definitely felt domestically.
The revelation itself fueled this intense, lasting suspicion. It created
a permanent crack in the foundation of trust between the
press and the public, and it directly feeds into modern
conspiracy theories. You still hear today about agency brigged reporters
pushing propaganda within the US media itself.
Speaker 1: Even though the original focus was overseas.
Speaker 2: Even though the documented program was focused overseas, it proved
the government had the capacity and importantly, the institutional willingness
to co opt the narrative structure itself. That's a hard
bell to unring.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if the government was trying to co opt
the big narrative, how did they try to get everyday
people involved in disruption on a smaller scale.
Speaker 2: Ah. That brings us to one of the most well,
delightfully unsettling documents ever declassified, the OSS Simple Sabotage Field
Manual from nineteen forty four.
Speaker 1: Simple Sabotage sounds intriguing OSS again, so pre CIA.
Speaker 2: Right Office of Strategic Services. During World War II, they
developed this comprehensive guide, but not for spis or commandos.
It was for the average person living in Nazi occupied Europe.
Speaker 1: For ordinary citizens. What was the goal.
Speaker 2: The goal was to transform ordinary citizens into what the
manual literally called citizen saboteurs.
Speaker 1: Citizen saboteurs how like blowing things up?
Speaker 2: Mostly No, that's the brilliance of it. It focused on
non violent, untraceable, often non provable acts of rebellion, things
that could easily be dismissed as just accidents or incompetence
or simple bureaucratic oversight.
Speaker 1: So weaponizing inefficiency.
Speaker 2: Exactly, weaponizing banality and bureaucracy against an occupying force. It's genius.
Speaker 1: Really, Give me some examples. What kind of things did
it suggest?
Speaker 2: Okay, consider administrative tactics. If you worked in an office
under occupation, you were advised to be excessively meticulous about
tiny details, find ways to slightly mishear direct instructions, Insist
on forming unnecessary committees for everything, complicate processes by requiring
multiple layers of pointless review uhha.
Speaker 1: Basically make bureaucracy unbearable.
Speaker 2: Precisely weaponize and competence and paperwork.
Speaker 1: What about more physical stuff?
Speaker 2: Factory workers just as insidious, but subtle. Dull your tools,
slightly dirty them, increase the chance of vehicles breaking down later.
If you were, say, sweeping a barrack's floor, the manual
suggested sweeping dirt under the rugs to accelerate wear and tear,
or maybe accidentally block a fire hydrant.
Speaker 1: Little things that add up exactly.
Speaker 2: The goal was friction, decrease efficiency, subtly chip away at
enemy morale and infrastructure day by day.
Speaker 1: Were there tips for just everyday interactions?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, Nuisance acts encourage ordinary citizens to give Nazi
soldiers the wrong directions, make pointless phone calls to their offices. Sorry,
wrong number, then hang up. Imagine thousands of people doing
these tiny, frustrating things every single day, across a whole continent.
Speaker 1: The cumulative effect must have been madening.
Speaker 2: That's the idea, soul crushing inconvenience as a form of resistance.
Speaker 1: Is this manual still classified?
Speaker 2: Nope, that's what's wild. The CIAD classified it in two
thousand and Eight's publicly available on their website. Now you
can go read it.
Speaker 1: Wow, a historical blueprint for everyday.
Speaker 2: Resistance, and it really highlights that the greatest tools for
subversion are often patients process and just pervasive, annoying inconvenience.
Speaker 1: So you see this progression, sophisticated narrative control with Mockingbird,
and this effective grassroots disruption with the Sabotage Manual, A
real shift towards psychological and non lethal stuff.
Speaker 2: Very effective shift in many ways, but sometimes sometimes the
pursuit of non lethal means led to things that were
not just ineffective, but completely and utterly absurd.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have a feeling I know where this is going.
Are we talking about the gay bomb?
Speaker 2: We are, indeed talking about the infamous gay bomb?
Speaker 1: Was that? I mean, was that real? A real proposal? Oh?
Speaker 2: It was real. The term is informal, obviously, but it's
an accurate nickname for a US Air Force research proposal
filed in nineteen ninety four. The planners, based in Ohio
were genuinely serious about creating a chemical weapon, non lethal
but debilitating through distraction.
Speaker 1: Distraction.
Speaker 2: How the concept laid out in the proposal was to
engineer a chemical aphrodigiac, something that, when sprayed over enemy positions,
would make the soldiers and I quote so gay and
horny that they'd be too distracted to be combat effective.
Speaker 1: You're kidding. They actually wrote that down.
Speaker 2: They actually read that down. It sounds like a terrible
B movie plot, But the proposal itself was detailed. It
went through several stages of planning.
Speaker 1: Did they estimate a cost? This wasn't just some joke, right,
I not a joke to them.
Speaker 2: Apparently they estimated the research and development costs at seven
point five.
Speaker 1: Million dollars seven and a half million.
Speaker 2: That figure alone tells you something. This wasn't just a
dudol on napkin. It involved institutional resources, multiple levels of
review before it even got leaked.
Speaker 1: So did they did you build it? Please tell me
they didn't build it?
Speaker 2: Thankfully, No, the project was never actually funded, but the
proposal was leaked to the public.
Speaker 1: Well, I bet that one Overwhell.
Speaker 2: The ridicule was immediate, widespread, and entirely deserved. It serves
as this bizarre, frankly hilarious, but also embarrassing endpoint to
that whole psychological warfare journey. It just shows that even
when you're focused on non lethal options, you can still
waste massive resources on wildly improbable, frankly ridiculous concepts. From
the sophisticated OSS tactics to hormonal chaos bombs. Quite a trajectory,
all right. So, shifting from the psychological and the occasionally absurd,
let's move into some major Cold War ambits, projects that
required massive, complex engineering, staggering amounts of money, and, in
one very notable case, a complete suspension of rational belief.
Speaker 1: Okay, sounds like big stuff. Where do we start.
Speaker 2: Let's start with a feat of engineering, an espionage that
honestly reads like a spy thriller, Project Azorian, the Great
Soviet Submarine Heists.
Speaker 1: The submarine heist. Right when did this happen?
Speaker 2: The story begins back in February nineteen sixty eight. A
Soviet ballistic missile submarine, the K one twenty nine, went
radio silent deep in the Pacific Ocean, just vanished, vanished,
Declared missing in March. The Soviets spent months searching huge
naval operations, but they couldn't find it. They had no
idea where it went.
Speaker 1: Down, but the US knew ah well.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, US Navy analysts are listening. They were using their
highly sensitive, highly classified SOSIS hydrophone array sosis.
Speaker 1: What's that?
Speaker 2: Think of it as a massive network of underwater microphones
basically placed strategically on the ocean floor, primarily desire to
detect and track Soviet subs. Okay, so the US quickly
noticed this strange Soviet search patterns. The analysts went back
through their acoustic data recordings from around the time the
K one twenty nine disappeared, and they found something that
Soviets had missed entirely.
Speaker 1: Would they hear?
Speaker 2: They picked up a distinct, very low frequency acoustic signature.
It suggested the K one twenty nine hadn't just sunk quietly,
It had violently imploded, probably due to some catastrophic malfunction.
Speaker 1: Imploded. Wow, did they know where the acoustic.
Speaker 2: Data was precise enough using triangulation from multiple sensors that
the Navy pin planted the REX location miles deep on
the ocean.
Speaker 1: Floor, So they knew exactly where this advanced Soviet sub
was lying they did.
Speaker 2: They even sent deep sea remote cameras down to scout
it out, confirming it was largely intact and likely contained
highly sensitive tech nuclear missiles, codebooks, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, so finding it is one thing. Getting it back
that sounds impossible.
Speaker 2: That discovery led to an incredibly audacious, top secret proposal.
It came from Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Their idea, let's raise the wreck,
Let's get our hands on that Soviet technology.
Speaker 1: Raise a submarine from miles deep.
Speaker 2: Seriously, seriously. President Nixon approved the unbelievably risky plan, and
he put the CIA in charge of the whole extraction operation.
Project Azorian was born.
Speaker 1: How do you even attempt something like that? Secretly? The
Soviets must have been watching.
Speaker 2: And that's where the cover story comes in, and it
was brilliant. The CIA commissioned a custom built, highly specialized
recovery ship, the Hughes Glomar.
Speaker 1: Explorer Hughes as in Howard Hughes exactly.
Speaker 2: They claimed the ship was owned by the eccentric billionaire
Howard Hughes and that it was built for deep sea mining,
specifically mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. The name
Glomar even stood for Global Marine. It was all an
elaborate front.
Speaker 1: A plausible cover for a weird ship doing weird things
in the middle of the ocean.
Speaker 2: Precisely and The ship itself was an engineering marble designed
for this covert purpose. It was incredibly stable in rough seas,
and crucially, it had a massive hidden cavity beneath the waterline,
an internal moon pool.
Speaker 1: A moon pool what for?
Speaker 2: It allowed the CIA to secretly lower a gigantic custom
built mechanical claw. Its internal nickname was Clementine, thousands and thousands.
Speaker 1: Of feet down to the red A giant claw.
Speaker 2: A giant claw. The plan was to grab the sunken submarine,
lift it up, pull it inside the ship, through the
moon pool, and seal the whole thing away, all while
Soviet surveillance ships were constantly nearby watching the glomars supposed
mining operations.
Speaker 1: That sounds absolutely insane. Did it work?
Speaker 2: The ambition was colossal. The execution, unfortunately, was a catastrophic failure.
Speaker 1: Oh no, what happened?
Speaker 2: Despite all the incredible engineering, all the secrecy, the billions
spent that giant mechanical claw, Clementine suffered a major structural fail.
Part way through the lift.
Speaker 1: It broke. While holding this up.
Speaker 2: It broke. The result was that two thirds of the
Soviet summer in the most valuable parts, containing the missiles
and encryption gear broke away and sank right back down
to the abyssle plane lost forever.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So it was a total failure, billions.
Speaker 2: Wasted, not a total wash out, but a huge disappointment.
They did manage to salvage a smaller thirty eight foot
section of the K one to twenty nine s BOO.
Speaker 1: Anything useful in that part?
Speaker 2: Yes, according to the sources, that section contained invaluable intelligence,
including two nuclear torpedoes, and also, tragically, the bodies of
six Soviet crewmen.
Speaker 1: What happened to them?
Speaker 2: They were given a formal military burial at sea by
the US crew. It was actually filmed, apparently as a
potential diplomatic gesture. Later, the ship's bell was also recovered,
and that was eventually returned to the Soviets years later,
though the recovery itself wasn't publicly acknowledged until the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: So some intel, but not the main prize. What was
the price tag on this partial success, partial fur failure.
Speaker 2: That's where it really stings. When you adjust for inflation,
the entire operation costs the equivalent of five point one
billion dollars in today's money.
Speaker 1: Five point one billion dollars YEP.
Speaker 2: For a thirty eight foot section. It was a high stakes,
high tech gamble. It successfully confirmed US acoustic tracking superiority
was leagues ahead of the Soviets, which was valuable in itself,
but the primary goal of recovering the core Soviet technology
mostly failed.
Speaker 1: Okay, five point one billion on a maybe achievable engineering feat.
What about spending on things that were less based in reality?
Speaker 2: Ah, well, if we're talking about expensive speculative failures, we
absolutely have to pivot now to the Stargate project Progate.
Speaker 1: Not the movie.
Speaker 2: Uh huh No, not the movie, though maybe just as
fantastical in its own way. Project's Stargate was a real
defense intelligence agency program. It ran for decades, starting roughly
in the post nineteen seventies era, all the way up
until nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 1: And what was its premise? What were they trying to do?
Speaker 2: The core was simple, if mind boggling could psychic powers
the paranormal provide a genuine Cold War intelligence advantage.
Speaker 1: Psychic powers like est telekinesis.
Speaker 2: Yes, seriously, seriously and crucially, this wasn't some friend under
the radar thing. It was treated as a serious military effort.
It employed actual intelligence officers scientists and receive substantial, consistent
federal funding for over two decades.
Speaker 1: What on earth made them think this was a good
use of resources? Was there some evidence?
Speaker 2: The initial spark, according to our sources, seems to have
been Cold War paranoia mixed with flimsy evidence. There was
apparently a video circulating allegedly showing a Russian girl performing
psychic feats. Now later analysis revealed it was just simple
camera trickery, but the fear took root immediately. What if
the Soviets are developing psychic spies. We can't fall behind,
even if it seems crazy. We have to investigate it.
We need to understand the capability gap.
Speaker 1: Classic Cold War. We must do it because they might
be doing it.
Speaker 2: Thinking textbook, so Stargate got underway with three main goals.
Speaker 1: Okay, what were they?
Speaker 2: First? Rigorously test if remote viewing supposedly seeing things far
away with your mind, could actually gather actionable intelligence on
foreign targets, like could a psychic describe a hidden Soviet
missile silo? Second, second, figure out if rival nations, specifically
the Soviets, were actually developing these abilities themselves intelligence and counterintelligence.
And third, third run laboratory experiments try to scientifically understand
psychic phenomena and maybe even find ways to improve psychic
performance for real world military or intelligence applications.
Speaker 1: So they were really trying to train psychic spies. What
kind of powers were they looking for?
Speaker 2: Oh, the list sounds like something out of a comic book.
Remote viewing was the main focus, but they also explored
telekinesis moving objects with the mind, pyrokinesis starting fires.
Speaker 1: With the mind, starting fires with your mind that was
on the list.
Speaker 2: And even the really chilling idea of potentially killing someone
using only concentrated thought.
Speaker 1: This this is wild. Hmmm, who are they studying? Did they
find anyone with these powers?
Speaker 2: They spent significant time and money studying various self proclaimed
psychic prodigies, famous names like the spoon Bender Eurie Geller
were involved. Also an eccentric figure named Ingo Swan who
reportedly coined the term remote viewing and.
Speaker 1: Was a key subject Uri Geller.
Speaker 2: Seriously, the methods involve having these individuals try to sketch
locations or describe events happening at distant, secret foreign military
bases while observers monitored their physiological responses trying to find correlations.
Speaker 1: Work did they get any useful intel.
Speaker 2: The operational results were consistently useless. Remote viewers could sometimes
sketch vague geographical features, maybe get a sense of water
or buildings, but the level of detail was never specific
enough to be actionable intelligence.
Speaker 1: You know, the secret documents are in the third drawer down.
Speaker 2: Nothing like that. The occasional hit where a description seemed
vaguely accurate was usually explainable by chance or the viewer
having some basic background knowledge of the type of target
they were asked about. It wasn't statistically significant.
Speaker 1: So after decades of trying, what was the conclusion?
Speaker 2: The project was finally shut down in nineteen ninety five.
A formal assessment was done by an external team including
respected scientists. Their verdict was blunt and definitive quote no
good came of any kind of psychic research on the
US taxpayer's dime.
Speaker 1: Twenty five years and nothing.
Speaker 2: Nothing useful. They spent a quarter of a century attempting
to prove psychic abilities could be weaponized for military use,
and they failed unequivocally. It was deemed an embarrassing cautionary
tale of irresponsible military spending.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's quite the contrast with the Zurian.
Speaker 2: Isn't it a powerful contrast? Absolutely? You have Azorian massive
financial and engineering investment in something physically plausible, though incredibly difficult,
high risk physics and engineering, right, and then you have Stargate,
an equivalent sustained speculative investment based almost entirely on paranormal
belief in cold warfare. It really speaks volumes about the
level of desperation during that era, the pressure to gain
any edge over the Soviet Union, even if it meant
betting billions on telekinesis and remote viewing.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the common thread in Missorian Stargate se spray,
It's all about controlling information, keeping secrets in sometimes trying
to shape public perception exactly.
Speaker 2: Secrecy is the currency.
Speaker 1: So now let's move to how the government tried to
manage its internal image and information flow and crucially those
moments when that control just completely failed broke wide open.
Speaker 2: Right. And let's start with a figure you wouldn't normally
associate with FBI informants, Walter Disney.
Speaker 1: Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse worked with the FBI, not.
Speaker 2: Just worked with them. He was a dedicated, close working
ally and informant for the FBI. Director Jay Edgar Hoover, get.
Speaker 1: Out seriously, what was he informing on?
Speaker 2: This alliance wasn't just friendly, it was operational. Disney was
a staunch capitalist, fiercely anti communists, and very anti union.
Hoover leveraged that. Disney eagerly snitched as the sources put it,
on anyone he perceived as a communist, agitator or hew
left wing views within the entertainment industry. He used his
influence and access to Hoover to help the FBI root
out descent in Hollywood and actively worked to bust unions
during labor disputes at his own studio. So he was
naming names to Hoover, naming names, providing information absolutely, and
his role went beyond just being an informant. Disney actually
allowed Hoover to have input on creative decisions in some
of his films. Hoover was dictating movie content to ensure
they aligned with the FBI's ideological stance, essentially weaving government
approved messaging subtly into popular culture. It was a mutually
beneficial relationship for them.
Speaker 1: How close was this relationship did Disney have any official status?
Speaker 2: He became such a trusted asset that in nineteen fifty four,
Hoover gave him the rare privilege of being titled a
Special Agent in Charge Contact. That's amal designation Wow. And furthermore,
Disney was granted permission to film inside FBI headquarters and offices,
a huge deal at the time given Hoover's obsession with
secrecy and image control.
Speaker 1: Did Disney use this connection for his own purposes?
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely, He weaponized the government's anti communist paranoia for
his own gain. He uses political muscle during a bitter
studio strike back in nineteen forty one to pressure his opponents, and.
Speaker 1: The naming name's part, did that have real consequences for people?
Speaker 2: Devastating consequences. Most notoriously, he later ruined the careers and
lives of several animators by directly recommending them to the
House on American Activities Committee.
Speaker 1: HUAC McCarthy's committee.
Speaker 2: The very same His detailed reports to the FBI naming
names and outlining suspicions only came to light publicly decades
later in the nineteen nineties through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Speaker 1: So you have this icon of American entertainment actively working
with the government to enforce control to enforce ideological purity
within his.
Speaker 2: Industry, exactly, use secrecy and government power to suppress dissent.
Speaker 1: Now, let's look at the polar opposite, someone inside the
system who risked absolutely everything to break that control, to
expose the secrets.
Speaker 2: Right, we have to talk about Daniel Ellsberg and the
Pentagon Papers.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon Papers. Yeah, a huge moment in history. How
did that start?
Speaker 2: It started ironically from within the government itself. Back in
nineteen sixty seven, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara was
drawing deeply disillusioned with how the Vietnam War was going okay,
So he commissioned a top secret study group, the Vietnam
Study Task Force. Their explicit goal compile a comprehensive, accurate,
and exhaustive history of American involvement and decision making in
Vietnam from the very beginning.
Speaker 1: Why what was the purpose?
Speaker 2: The stated goal was brutally honest self assessment. To create
a detailed record, purely for internal use, so that future
generations of policymakers could understand precisely how and why the
war had gone so wrong? What were the key decision points,
where were the mistakes made?
Speaker 1: So an internal aught of the war essentially yes.
Speaker 2: The result was this immense, top secret report, over seven
thousand pages long, spanning forty volumes. It was completed under
intense security near the end of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency
and covered US involvement from nineteen forty five right up
to nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: And Elsburg where does he fit in?
Speaker 2: Daniel Ellsberg was a former military analyst working at the
Rand Corporation, a think tank with deep ties to the military.
He was one of the very few people outside the
core team who had the high level security clearance needed
to read the entire study. And as Elsberg read these
thousands of pages and simultaneously watched the war continue to escalate,
US casualties mount and public support crumble, he had a
crisis of conscience.
Speaker 1: What did the papers show him?
Speaker 2: They showed him unequivocally that the war was feeling But
more importantly, they showed that successive US governments Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy Johnson had systematically lied not just to the public
but to Congress itself about the the true scale, the origins,
and the prospects of the war.
Speaker 1: Lies about what specifically.
Speaker 2: Concealing covert military operations, downplaying failures, misrepresenting enemy strength, obscuring
the long history of US support for French colonial forces
way back in the forties and fifties, covertly training South
Vietnamese soldiers long before the official escalation. The core revelation
was that the government knew the war was likely unwinnable
or at least far harder than they admitted, yet continued
to escalate it while telling the public a very different story.
Speaker 1: So Elsberg is reading this knowing it proves the government
has been lying on a massive scale. What does he do?
Speaker 2: This is where that internal tension you mentioned becomes incredibly dramatic.
Elsberg came to believe his loyalty to the truth and
to the American public being deceived outweighed his legal obligation
to protect classified information, his oath to the Constitution. He
felt trumped his secrecy agreements a huge decision monumental. In
nineteen seventy one, he secretly photocopied thousands of pages of
the Pentagon Page and passed sections of them to a
reporter at the New York Times.
Speaker 1: Neil Sheehan and The Times published they did.
Speaker 2: The published expose was absolutely devastating. It sent shockwaves through
the country and the world.
Speaker 1: What was the immediate impact Politically?
Speaker 2: It was catastrophic for the Nixon administration. Even though the
lies predated him. It permanently shattered public faith in government
pronouncements about the war. Support for the war plummeted even further.
It fundamentally changed the national conversation.
Speaker 1: What happened to Elsburg? He must have faced serious charges.
Speaker 2: Oh, he did. He was charged with conspiracy, espionage, theft
of government property. He faced decades potentially life in prison.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't convicted.
Speaker 2: The charges were ultimately dismissed. Why because the government itself
engaged in serious misconduct during the prosecution. The Nixon White
House had authorized illegal wire tax against Elsburg and even
a break in at his psychiatrist's office. The infamous Plumbers
Unit was involved. When this came out, the judge declared
a mistrial and dismissed all charges due to governmental misconduct
tainting the case.
Speaker 1: Wow. So the government's attempts to silence him.
Speaker 2: Backfire spectacularly, and years later, even Robert McNamara, the man
who commissioned the study, admitted he did it partly because
he already believed the war was doomed by nineteen sixty
seven and wanted the historical record strait.
Speaker 1: So the juxtaposition is just incredible. Disney the icon working
with the state to enforce secrecy and control.
Speaker 2: Using government paranoia for his own ends, reinforcing the.
Speaker 1: System, and Elsburg the insider, weaponizing the government's own classified
facts against the state to enforce public accountability.
Speaker 2: Breaking the system open from within. It really highlights that
fundamental tension in a democracy that relies heavily on secrecy,
where does loyalty truly lie with the institution or with
the public and the truth. Elsberg forced that question into
the open like never before.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered biological tests, propaganda, billion dollar heists, psychic spies,
and foremants whistleblowers. Now let's get to the operations that
really push the envelope, the ones that show the most extreme,
maybe desperate, and sometimes morally terrifying lengths government planners were
willing to consider to achieve their goal.
Speaker 2: Right, these are the plans that reveal the absolute outer
boundaries of classified thinking, where necessity or perceived necessities seem
to override almost everything.
Speaker 1: Else and nothing quite demonstrates sheer persistence, maybe obsession and
ultimately futility, like the decade's long effort to get rid
of Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2: Oh, the Castra applauds, it's almost a genre onto itself.
The CIA, often working with let's say, less reliable partners
like mafia figures and disgruntled Cuban dissidents, spent decades trying
to assassinate the leader of Communist Cuba.
Speaker 1: Decades. How many attempts are we talking about?
Speaker 2: The official estimate compiled by a Cuban official who used
to run Castro's security detail is six hundred and thirty
four thirty four failed attempts.
Speaker 1: Six hundred and thirty four or confirmed failed attempts. According
to that source, it became this bizarre marathon, starting with
somewhat conventional plots and quickly descending into the utterly absurd,
almost cartoonish if it weren't deadly serious and intent.
Speaker 2: Give us some examples beyond just you know, shooting out.
Speaker 1: Oh, they got creative. They tried spiking his beloved cigars
with potent baculinum toxin. The idea was he'd light up
inhial and die.
Speaker 2: Did it work?
Speaker 1: Nope? Apparently the assassin task with delivering the poisoned cigars
lost them. They never reached Castro.
Speaker 2: You can't make this stuff up? What else?
Speaker 1: Okay? When direct poisoning failed, they got environmental. Castro loved diving,
so one plan involved hiding a bomb inside a large,
beautifully painted seashell. The hope was it would attract his
attention while he was underwater. He'd pick it up and boom.
Speaker 2: And exploding seashell. Seriously, seriously. If that didn't work, maybe
a debilitating skin disease. They planned to contaminate one of
his custom diving suits with a fungus designed to give
him a nasty, chronic skin condition. May be forcing him
out of the public eye.
Speaker 1: Gross more spy movie stuff.
Speaker 2: Absolutely Another classic concealing a deadly hypodermic needle filled with
poison inside a seemingly normal ballpoint pen for an assassin
to use in close quarters.
Speaker 1: These sound like rejected James Bond plots.
Speaker 2: Some of them really do. The sheer range of these
attempts just highlights this pathological focus on one single target.
It suggests, frankly, an incredible level of organizational dysfunction, This
belief that if you just keep throwing increasingly ridiculous ideas
at the problem. Eventually, one has to work.
Speaker 1: Were they all lethal or were some just aimed at
discrediting him?
Speaker 2: Not all releasal, Some were purely psychological warfare, designed for humiliation,
hoping to destabilize his public image and authority like what
One plan involved using thallium salts, a chemical that causes
hair loss, possibly delivered through his shoes or dusting powder,
the goal to make his iconic beard a potent symbol
of the Cue revolution fallout. The thinking was the humiliation
might destroy his.
Speaker 1: Charisma, Meggie's beard, fallout.
Speaker 2: And maybe even stranger. Another plot involved pumping hallucinogenic gas
something like LSD into the ventilation system of a radio
recording booth while he was delivering one of his famously
long national address naming came sound crazy on air, exactly
make him seem incoherent manic, completely losing his grips, thus
discrediting him in front of the entire nation. The desperation
behind these plans is just staggering, but.
Speaker 1: Ultimately they all failed six hundred and thirty four times.
Speaker 2: All failed due to incompetence, terrible luck for the plotters,
maybe Castro's own security being better than credited or just
the sheer absurdity of the plans themselves.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Castro plans represent absurdity and failure. But
there was another plan from that era aimed at Cuba
that wasn't absurd. He was freateningly sophisticated, highly organized, and
morally terrifying.
Speaker 2: And it failed only because of a single decision made
at the very highest level. You're talking about Operation Norwoods.
Speaker 1: Operation Northwoods. This one, this one is genuinely chilling. Tell
us about it.
Speaker 2: This takes us to the lowest point ethically speaking, in
our deep dive today. In the early nineteen sixties, this
was post Bay of Pig's failure. Tensions with Cuba were
sky high. The US Department of Defense, specifically the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, formally proposed staging false flag terrorist attacks
on American soil.
Speaker 1: False flag attacks meaning.
Speaker 2: Meaning attacks designed to look like they were carried out
by Cuba but actually perpetrated by the US military itself.
Speaker 1: Why what was the objective?
Speaker 2: The chillingly clear objective stated in the documents was to
sway American and international public opinion to create an undeniable
justification a cassis belly for launching a full scale military
invasion of Cuba.
Speaker 1: They were going to attack Americans to justify a war.
What kind of attacks were they proposing?
Speaker 2: These weren't just vague ideas. These were detailed, advanced plans
submitted formally by the highest military leadership. Specific proposals in
included staging the fake shootdown of a US civilian airliner,
blaming it on Cuban MiGs, or even more disturbingly, sinking
a US Navy ship in Guantanamo.
Speaker 1: Bay thinking our own ship.
Speaker 2: Sinking our own ship, potentially remotely controlled and unmanned, but
making it look like a Cuban attack. And here's the
truly cynical part. The plan explicitly included a sophisticated psychological
warfare component. It's specifically called for publishing a fake casualty
list in American newspapers after the stage ship.
Speaker 1: Attack, fake dead sailors.
Speaker 2: Fake dead sailors. The document states the goal was to
create a helpful wave of national indignation, manufactured public outrage,
designed solely to generate popular support for the invasion and
war that the military leadership wanted.
Speaker 1: That's horrifying. Who saw these plans to get approved?
Speaker 2: These terrifyingly advanced plans signed off by the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, actually made it all the way to the
desk of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, and ultimately
were presented in the context of anti Castro planning to
disc gushions involving President John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 1: Kennedy saw this, what did he do?
Speaker 2: And here's where history pivots mercifully. President Kennedy rejected the operation.
He shut it down. He was reportedly appalled by the concept.
Speaker 1: So it never happened.
Speaker 2: It never happened. But the plan itself, the fact that
it was formally proposed and seriously considered at the highest
levels of the US military, that remained a closely guarded secret,
locked away in classified files, dwelling in obscurity for nearly
forty years until finally being declassified in the late nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: The contrast with the Castro plots is just stark, isn't it?
Speaker 2: Absolutely stark? The bizarre attempts on Castro's life failed mostly
due to incompetence or bad luck or sheer absurdity. Operation Northwoods, however,
was a calculated, internally coherent, strategically planned proposal to intentionally
kill American citizens to manufacture consent for war. It didn't
fail because it was stupid. It failed because one person
at the very top said no.
Speaker 1: And that really forces you to ask what prevents these
kinds of internal machinations, proposals to attack your own citizens
for geopolitical gain. What stops them from being proposed or
maybe even attempted? Again, it relied entirely on one person's
judgment call.
Speaker 2: It's a deeply unsettling question. What are the institutional guardrails really?
Northwoods proves that the capacity for such thinking existed at
the highest levels hashtag tag outro. So if we try
to connect all these threads, pull back for the bigger picture,
We've really traversed this hidden landscape of government secrecy, haven't we.
We've seen the incredible breadth of these operations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been quite a journey, from contaminating major cities
like San Francisco.
Speaker 2: To co opting the press with Operation Mockingbird, to wasting
billions trying to raise subs or chasing psychic spies right.
Speaker 1: And even developing detailed plans like Northwoods proposing attacks on
our own citizens.
Speaker 2: The common thread through all of it, I think, is
the immense, often unchecked power that gets wielded behind that
veil of classification, and the constant struggle often failing to
maintain ethical boundaries once that veil is in place.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for you listening right now?
What's the takeaway?
Speaker 2: Well, the leaks, the declassifications we've discussed today, they provide
this rare, sometimes painful, but necessary look behind the curtain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a reminder that sometimes the unbelievable parts of history
are unfortunately the most factual.
Speaker 2: Exactly and gaining knowledge quickly but thoroughly, like we try
to do in these deep dives, means understanding these hidden currents,
the failures of oversight, the long term consequences like environmental contamination,
the extreme limits of executive power. It's not just about
the headlines, It's about.
Speaker 1: The deep cuts, understanding the mechanisms behind the official story.
Speaker 2: And these documents, the detailed accounts of sea sprays, fall out,
the revelations and the Pentagon papers, the fightening proposal of
Operation Northwoods. They really force us collectively to continually renegotiate
that delicate balance between legitimate nowtional security and fundamental public trust.
Speaker 1: Knowing that the government once formally proposed weaponizing public outrage,
manufacturing consent for war. That should permanently change how we
evaluate official claims of necessity. Shouldn't that?
Speaker 2: It absolutely should. It demands a higher level of scrutiny,
a more skeptical.
Speaker 1: Eye, because the discovery of these secrets, whether it happens
through whistleblowers like Elsberg risking everything, or just through simple
declassification decades later when no one involves still around, it
reveals this continuous operational capacity for extreme measures within the system.
So if documents detailing formalized plans to create manufactured outrage
to target US ships, if those existed once within the
highest ranks of government, Yeah, what ongoing classified plans, perhaps
equally terrifying in their moral implications, might be sitting in
a file somewhere right now, just waiting for their own
eventual declassification.
Speaker 2: It's a sobering thought, isn't it? What secrets are still
waiting to surface?
Speaker 1: Definitely something to mull over until our next DA dive